Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Now Is The Winter ...

Image credit: Cujo359

The snow fell last night, even though it was right around freezing. Figuring that it wasn't going to last until I woke up this morning, I decided to try using the timed exposure settings on my camera to take a picture. This and a couple of others came out pretty well.

Pictures like this tend to work out, because the snow reflects so much light. Normally, even with a street lamp overhead, my yard would be too dark to take any interesting pictures in these atmospheric conditions. Snow changes that.

The quote, of course, is from the opening of Shakespeare's Richard III, a tragedy about, at least peripherally, the War Of The Roses, another of England's many civil wars. It's how I feel right now, watching the aftermath of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. It's molestus hoc, ergo propter hoc writ large - whatever bothers people about this country is the cause, no matter whether the evidence points to it or not. It's not ironic that I first wrote about that concept after another crazy shooting spree; it's just part of a pattern. Sarah Palin's rhetoric didn't create this situation - she's just a grifter who came along to take advantage of it. She's a little like our current President, only not quite as smart, and not quite as successful. Depressingly few people are interested in that idea, though. Everyone wants to shout, and I don't feel like shouting over them.

It's tough watching your country die amidst squalid, nonsensical arguments about things that, generally speaking, are really just symptoms of our current problems, but that's where we are. As I've said before, stupidity has its price, and we're paying it, one loud, stupid argument at a time.

This was my first attempt, Suzanne. The key here was that I could just use the delayed shutter setting, set the thing up on a window frame, and let it sit there until it had absorbed enough light to make a picture. I ended up using the longest shutter time, which was four seconds. I wish I'd had more. As I wrote, if the snow hadn't been there, even this picture would have been too dark to see much of anything.